The sociophonology and sociophonetics of Scottish Standard English (r)

This paper inspects the variability of (r) in non-linking coda positions (e.g. in the words car, far, and art) in Scottish Standard English (SSE), accepting the three variants [ɾ], [ɹ], and Ø. Interviews with 27 middle-class speakers were conducted, eliciting three styles (careful speech, reading passage, and word list). Following a discussion of previous research on (r) in SSE and an explanation of the conditional hierarchical logistic regression model applied to the data, results are presented with a focus on social and stylistic factors. It appears that female speakers are more likely to vocalise /r/, and older speakers are more likely to use the more traditional tapped variant [ɾ]. Thus, quasi-phonological variation correlates with gender, and phonetic variation correlates with age. Moreover, contact with Southern Standard British English (SSBE) also increases the rates of (r)-vocalisation. In word list style, all speakers are less likely to vocalise (r), but there are significant differences between social groups in this respect: especially young men’s accents are almost categorically rhotic in word list style.